Field of the Disclosure
The present invention relates to processing loose products such as coffee beans and to processing equipment.
Description of the Related Art
Commercial equipment for processing loose products such as coffee beans has not undergone any significant recent improvements in efficiency, adjustability or precision. The principles employed in widely utilized coffee roasters are virtually the same as those used over several decades ago.
The main improvement of recent ovens corresponds to the implementation of roasting through “fluid bed” techniques. Contrary to older drum ovens, where loose products are mixed mechanically and roasting occurs in a mesh drum with a horizontal rotation axis, and the drum has metal blades that stir the loose products as the drum rotates, more recent ovens stir and roast loose products through the action of hot air that generates a fluid bed under the loose products. Oven apparatuses with such features have long been known and widely used. In such a system, a fluid bed is generated through an area relatively small to the total volume of the loose products being roasted.
Such systems have a number of drawbacks, namely, a certain amount of the loose products would always concentrate near the fluid bed and be intensively stirred, while another part would go away from the fluid bed, and end up accumulated in an inactive layer. As a result, poor mixing of loose products in the ovens of this type does not ensure the maximum uniformity of roasting.
Furthermore, common roasting apparatuses lack adjustability, for example the ability to define a unique profile of roasting, which allows not only to track natural endothermic and exothermic processes in the roasting apparatus, but to also make adjustments to them, whereby the temperature in the chamber is raised or lowered depending on the selected profile. This adjustability is not available in common transmission-type roasting apparatuses. In such type of roasting apparatuses, only the time spent by loose products in the oven and the temperature of the burner could be adjusted. In addition, in commonly available roasting apparatuses loose products are continuously fed into the oven with a fixed temperature making it impossible to successively and precisely process different batches of loose products that may require different conditions for roasting.
In addition, commonly available roasting apparatuses lack of clear ways to visually inspect the process during roasting operation, as well as ways to easily and quickly access the main elements of the oven during maintenance.
Finally, a cooling stage that follows the roasting stage of the loose products also needs improvement. Standard cooling processes used in loose product apparatuses employ vertical coolers where the roasted loose products are cooled by being drop into a vertical intense flow of cold air. Such vertical coolers consume a lot of energy and require a long time for the loose products to be cooled.